Thursday, August 11, 2016

BURNING MOON by Jo Waston

Michael
Edwards—fiancé of one year, perfect boyfriend of two—had left me, Lilly
Swanson, just ten minutes before I was scheduled to walk down the aisle. The
bottle of perfume that he’d wanted me to wear today, insisted I wear, because
“it was his favorite,” mocked me from the dressing table. So I picked it up and
threw it against the wall, watching it shatter into a million pieces, just like
my life. I was hit by the sickly sweet smell of jasmine and felt sick to my
stomach.

What was I going
to tell the five-hundred guests who were sitting in the church waiting for me?
Some had even flown here to South Africa all the way from Australia.

Hi everyone.
Thanks for coming. Guess what? SURPRISE! No wedding!

A wedding that my
father had spent a small fortune on.

A wedding that was
going to be perfect.

Perfect, dammit.Perfect!

I’d made sure of
that. I had painstakingly handled every single tiny detail. It had taken months
and months of meticulous planning to create this day, and now what?

Things went very
blurry all of a sudden. I vaguely remember my brother James bursting into the
room, screaming insults and then vowing to kill him. He even punched the best
man when he claimed to have no knowledge of Michael’s whereabouts. My rational,
logical father tried to find a legitimate motive for Michael’s behavior,
insisting we speak to him before jumping to any rash conclusions. Hundreds of
phone calls followed: where was he? Who had seen him? Where did he go?

At some stage the
guests were told, and the rumor mill went into full swing…

He’d had an
affair.

He’d eloped with
someone else.

He was a criminal
on the run.

He was gay.

He’d been beamed
up by aliens and was being experimented on. (Hopefully it was painful.)

People threw
around bad words like bastard, asshole and liar. They
also threw around words like shame, sorry and pity. They
wondered whether they should take their wedding gifts back, or leave them. What
was the correct protocol in a situation like this?

While the world
around me was going mad, I felt a strange calm descend. Nothing seemed real
anymore, and I began to feel like a voyeur looking at my life from a distance.
I didn’t care that I was sitting on the floor in my bra and panties. I didn’t
care that my mascara and lipstick were so smudged I looked like Batman’s Joker.
I just didn’t care.

Some minutes later
my other brother Adam, the doctor, burst in and insisted I drink a Coke and
swallow the little white pill he was forcing down my throat. It would calm me,
he said.

Shortly after
that, my overly dramatic, theater-actress mother rushed in to give the
performance of her life.

“Why, why, why?”
She placed her hand across her heart.

“What is this, a
madness most discreet? A stench most foul?” She held her head and cried
out, “Whyyy?!”

“For heaven’s
sake, Ida, this isn’t some Shakespearean bloody play.” I could hear the anger
in my father’s voice. Even after 18 years of divorce, they still couldn’t be
civil to each other.

“Lest I remind you
that all the world is a stage.” My mother shouted back, the deep timbre in her
voice quivering for added dramatic tension as she tilted her head upward and
clenched her jaw.

“There you go
again with your crap! Clearly you still haven’t learned to separate fantasy
from reality!”

“Well, I managed
to do that with our marriage!”

My brother jumped
between them. “Stop it. This isn’t the time!”

And then all pandemonium broke out.

The priest came
around to offer some kind of spiritual guidance but exited quickly, and very
red-faced, when he saw my state of undress. Some inquisitive relatives stuck
their heads through the door, painted with sad, sorry puppy-dog looks, but
they, too, left when they saw me spread-eagled on the floor.

An enormous ruckus
ensued when the photographer burst in and started talking photos of me—no one
had told him. The ruckus became a total freak show when my favorite cousin
Annie, who had designed my dress for free as a wedding gift, saw the state of
her “best creation” lying crumpled and torn on the floor. She looked like she was about to cry.

Then everything
went very blurry and the noises around me combined into one strange drone.